


Tahnorra Week 2015

by dreamoverdrive



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-15
Packaged: 2018-04-09 00:22:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4326723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamoverdrive/pseuds/dreamoverdrive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Includes the prompts: Wintry, Rivalry, Teamwork, Bliss, Jonetsu, Desire, and Epilogue. Each prompt is about 1,000 words long, give or take. </p><p>"It always ended with him calling over to her, “Why so frosty, Uh-vatar?” She sneered back like someone who was trying disdain on for size just to find that it fit poorly."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rivalry

**Author's Note:**

> I'll post a new prompt each day of this week!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Rivalry

“It’s just rivalry!”

Bolin only raised his brow and Mako slouched further into his chair. She wasn’t quite sure when the two of them had decided to be so interested. _Or so perceptive_ , a smaller part of her whispered before she shoved it away. All she knew, was that as far as Mako and Bolin and anyone else for that matter was concerned, Tahno was nothing more than a rival.

And an infuriating one at that.

* * *

She was sitting in the booth by herself when he joined her. It had been a long week, and she had been pounded with enough insecurities by the press and Tarlok that even Mako or Bolin's company would have been too much.

She picked at her noodles and wondered what life would be like if she couldn’t bend the broth out of the bowl when someone slid into the seat across from her. She looked up to meet pale eyes flashing with amusement and resisted the urge to scream. 

He steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them, watching her with an unnerving amount of focus. “Hello.”

She waited for the smug _Uh-vatar_ to be tacked on at the end of his greeting, and when it didn’t come she shot him a wary look. “Hello, Tahno.”

“I thought you could use some company.”

She glared at her noodles and flexed her hands beneath the table. She refused to let him rile her up. In her current state, it wouldn’t take more than a few sharp remarks from him to get her swinging. She had been aching all week to fight something physical that existed outside of her head, and she really didn’t need Tahno making himself a nice, smirking, target that would be tangible under her knuckles.

“I’d never thought of you as the kind of person to ignore a dinner companion.”

“Companion,” she sputtered, looking up at him.

A small smile curled at the edges of his lips. “I find that sitting alone doesn’t do much for dealing with the beasties up here,” he said, tapping a long finger against his temple. “Whether you approve or not, I’ve taken it upon myself to provide you with company.”

“I don’t approve, thank you very much.” She scowled at him and took a large bite of her noodles, pointedly slurping as loudly as she could while he maintained his neutral smile. “The only beasties I have to deal with up here,” she finally said, tapping her temple, “are the ones you’re about to try and put there.”

He raised his hands and leaned back. She wondered if she could splash him with broth if she slurped louder. “I promise, no tricks tonight," he said seriously. "I’ve got plenty, but none worth using on an opponent when they’re already down. That’s not my style.”

She snorted. “I don’t know what makes you think I’m down or what makes you think that whatever _style_ you have is somehow honorable but—“

“You’ve had a rough week, haven’t you?”

She swallowed the rest of her words and resorted to a silent glare. She wanted to snap back so badly, but she was afraid that she’d say something she didn’t want him to hear. The Korra of a few months ago would have lashed back by now, or at least thrown him out of a window. This whole encounter was another reminder of how Republic City had started to change her, and it left her a little sad and disoriented.

“I remember how it was when I first got here.” He nodded at her bowl of noodles as if they were familiar to him. Korra realized that in all the times she had come, she had never seen him order more than red wine. “Everyone ignored me at first," he went on. "And then all of a sudden they were writing down everything I said and twisting it up till I barely recognized my own words. They were all asking thinly veiled favors and offering me things. All kinds of sponsors and coaches were trying to get a claw in the new bender."

Korra blinked when he stopped speaking and realized she had been paying rapt attention. He was staring at the table with a half-formed bitter look on his face— a sardonic twist to his lips and strange look in his eyes.

“Hey, but look at you now,” she said in a sudden impulse to reassure him.

He looked back up at her in surprise and then gave her a small smile without the usual razor sharp edge or pretense hanging on it. “Yes, I suppose I've done well enough.” He shifted and drummed the table with his fingers. “I suppose what I’m saying, Korra—“she almost fell over when he used her name and it seemed to amuse him, “—is don’t let them tell you what you are and aren’t. You might just become the image they make for you, and when you’re stuck, you’re stuck.”

The words hit her hard and she pressed her lips together to keep herself from saying something she'd regret later. Just because he had come to give her some twisted form of advice didn't mean she could tell him anything weighing on her mind. The fact remained that soon enough, they'd be standing on opposite ends of the probending ring and looking at each other through the hard plastic of helmets. Her defensive instinct kicked in and she tried a weak glare.

“This is a little hypocritical, don’t you think? Haven’t you been calling me Little Girl for the last week?”

His eyes flashed in the dim light of the yellow lamp hanging above them as he leaned forward. “And are you going to let me call you that?" He smirked at her, a challenge in his face. "Are you planning on letting me get away with it, _Little Girl_?”

Korra felt a familiar confidence stirring in her chest and she sat up straighter, leaning in to let him know he didn’t intimidate her one bit. “Not at all, _Pretty Boy_ ,” she breathed into the space between them.

His eyes gleamed right in front of hers, pale green blended with blue, and she could almost feel his lips turning up into that infuriating grin. Everything was happening so quickly, and she could feel the power back in her veins again—

“Good,” he said as he pulled back suddenly and straightened his shirt. He glanced up at her from fixing his cuffs with a new guarded look. It seemed that she had at least managed to unsettle him a bit, but he gave her a cooked confident smile that was more reminiscent of the persona he’d worn the first time she met him. “That’s what I came to hear.”

Korra felt a strange disappointment as he stood from the booth. “Keep your focus, Uh-vatar," he said, slipping back into using the condescending nickname without a stutter. "You’ll be needing it when the time comes.”

As he walked away from her table and back to where his teammates sat, Korra wondered if he had meant their approaching pro-bending match or if he had meant something that was farther off and less certain. If he was referencing that final match between her and Amon, why did he care? Aside from obvious interest as a bender, why would he come and speak to her as if he had a personal investment in her success?

She looked back at her noodles and found that her appetite had returned. She smothered a small smile in case he was watching her from across the room and finished her food.

* * *

She sat in the waiting room with her head between her knees. Everything was spinning around and around, and she wondered if it was the delayed sense of vertigo from the fall that Lin had snatched her out of, or if things were just moving too quickly for her to keep up with.

“Korra, why are we here?”

She looked up to face Mako and Bolins. They still wore their sopping wet probending gear and widening puddles laid on the linoleum of the waiting room at their feet. The looked nearly as dazed as she did with dark hair plastered to their pale foreheads and vague looks in their eyes. Maybe all three of them had all hit the water harder than they thought.

She tried to speak but her words came out as a grating rasp. She swallowed again and found her mouth still tasted like copper from when she had been shocked. “He’s our rival,” she finally said in a crackling voice that reminded her of the equals gloves.

But was he really? She thought back to when he’d sat in front of her and said with amusement on his face, with no clue of what was to come, _don’t let them tell you what you are and aren’t._

She thought of how she’d clung to those words over the last few days, and especially in the last few hours. Thought of how when she had gone to the register after finishing her noodles, the surly barman told her that not only had her meal been picked up, but so had her whole tab. Thought of how she’d caught one more of those little smiles in the locker room, empty of sleaze and bravado. Thought of how he’d frozen the arena beneath her feet during the match, that _dirty lying cheat_. Thought of how he’d fallen like a dead bird from the stage to hit the water face first, and how she'd known that instant that same Tahno wouldn’t be fished out of the water.

But most of all, she thought of how they’d been staring at each other in Narook’s. How his eyes had been gleaming with something she couldn’t name, and how she had been just one quick instant and breath away from—

“Korra?”

She realized she was crying and swiped at her warm face angrily. This was so unlike her. A great rush of relief came when she remembered that the press wasn’t allowed in the waiting area. What a good story that would have made: Avatar Korra, crying in front of the healing room of Tahno, Republic City’s most desired bachelor. All after he’d had his bending stripped away, and all while she had done absolutely nothing to help him.

“Korra, tell us what’s wrong.”

She looked back up into the distressed faces of Mako and Bolin who didn’t seem to know what to say or whether or not they should push her or leave her. She must look like a madwoman.

Finally, she just shook her head and swiped away the rest of the hot tears bubbling at the corners of her eyes. “He’s our _rival._ ”

And so much more.


	2. Wintry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Wintry

It had really started as a joke.

He’d be lounging around the bar, shrugging arms off his shoulders and trying to blink through the haziness of his favorite wine when he’d catch her eye. She’d be leaned over her bowl of noodles, eyes sharp and glittering like ice with one teammate on her left and another on her right. He’d always feel his lips curl up into the same smile, the smile that said _tough company, am I right?_

She never smiled back.

It always ended with him calling over to her, _“Why so frosty, Uh-vatar?”_ She sneered back like someone who was trying disdain on for size just to find that it fit poorly.

* * *

 

When he passed by her in the locker rooms, he was always sure to lean in over her shoulder. He knew he was probably risking the shape of his nose and the general arrangement of his face whenever he did so, but if there was anything he recognized of himself in the Avatar, it was his desire to thrill and be thrilled. And he got the feeling that she would have tried to tear him apart the first time if she hadn’t looked forward to him coming back.

 _“Why so chilly?”_ He would whisper, just close enough for his breath to brush her cheek but far enough away that she wouldn’t feel panicked. As much as he loved pushing her, he never wanted to take it too far.

Unless they were in the ring, but that was another thing entirely. He got the feeling that she wanted him to fear her during matches, but it was the fearful kind of respect one predator had for another. And he relished it.

* * *

 

It was like his blood had frozen in his veins. Everything was numb and blurry and dead—

_and why was he so cold?_

They fished him off the side of the platform and dumped him on a stretcher, but all he could feel was the resounding hollowness at his core. Every voice above him was just an echo that ricocheted around his head and empty body, and he thought that if he wasn’t so disoriented, he’d scream.

Then there was one distinct voice right above him and a burning hand pressed against the skin of his face—

“Tahno! Tahno, can you hear me? _Tahno!_ ”

“Korra,” he rasped. Because that he knew. It was Uh-Vatar, it was Korra, it was her. A sob choked its way up his throat and he tried to clutch at her hand that kept smoothing over his face. He wasn’t sure where all the animosity and competition had gone, maybe into the void that had sucked up most of his being, but he was just so relieved.

“Korra, I’m so cold.” He choked again and then realized with some disgust that he was crying. “I’m so cold, Korra.”

“It’s ok, Tahno.” He voice sounded thick and strained, too, and he wondered if she was crying as well. “It’s going to be ok.”

“It’s not.” He tried to shake his head and found that it was still beyond him. “It’s not, Korra, it’s gone and _I’m so cold._ ”

At that point he passed out, but he woke in the morning with the same burning hand pressed over his. She was so warm it was almost painful, but it was all he could feel.

* * *

 

“You don’t have to pity me,” he spat. Venom was curling in his chest along with his newfound resentment for his situation, his life, his mess—

“I’m not pitying you.” She stared at him with level eyes in the doorway of his apartment. It had been a few weeks since she came and he was rational enough to know she had duties, especially now, but petty enough to have spent the time festering with fury in his freezing room.

“You are. Why else would you be standing there. To get a good look at me? To feel nice and noble because people are dragging your name through the mud? To feel better about yourself because this could have happened to you instead?”

He expected her to recoil away from him in hurt or shock, but she just stared with that same searing gaze. He found that he was terrified of melting if only because he wasn’t sure if there would be anything left to hold him together without the cold.

“Tahno.”

He pressed his hand to his forehead and rubbed furiously at his temples. “I just don’t know, Korra.”

“Tahno.”

“I don’t know! Please don’t push me, I don’t know what’s going on in my head anymore—“

She reached out for him and pulled him against her. He was overwhelmed by her warmth and shivered violently as she rested her hand on the nape of his neck and cradled his head into her shoulder.

He took in a sharp breath as she stroked his skin. “It’s the middle of summer and it feels like the fucking winter, Korra.” He broke off and shook his head as she hummed comfort into his collarbone. “It’s so cold. I’m so cold all the time and I don’t know if it’s going to be forever or not.”

“You’re going to be ok, Tahno.” Her voice was low and fierce. “You’re going to be ok, I promise.”

And with those words, ever so slightly, he felt the fingers of winter start letting him go.


	3. Teamwork

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Teamwork

“I don’t want you here for this.”

“Tahno—“

“I mean it.”

Korra stared at him and waited for him to look up at her. He gazed at the floor, face set in stubborn anger. She saw the dark circles beneath his eyes that still hadn’t quite faded and the gaunt cast to his face that sharpened his cheekbones far beyond what she felt was healthy. They were reminders that even now that he had his bending back, not everything was the same. He had refused to even bend water into a glass. His face had paled and his hand shook, as if he was restraining himself from the compulsion.

“You’ve seen enough of me like this,” he said in a quiet voice. “I don’t want you here for anymore of it, not when it isn’t even rational at this point.”

“Tahno! Of course it’s rational! You haven’t bent in months. No one expects you to jump—“

“Korra.” He looked back up at her and there was something haunting in his face that stopped her dead in her tracks. “Korra, you don’t understand. I gave this up. I gave this all up and I sat in the pit of hell for a few months because of it. I’d resigned myself to never bending again, ever. Do you know how hard that was for me to do?”

She reached out for him and he shook violently as he stared at her hand. Finally, he reached out and took her fingers in his shaking grip. He scoffed bitterly in the back of his throat and turned back to the floor. “I’m going to try, of course, but I’m not sure if I can do this. And I don’t want you to see me fail again.”

Korra squeezed his hand tightly. “Tahno…”

When she lost her bending to Amon, she didn’t even have the time to fully reconcile with the change, much less decide how she was going to adjust to it. Everything had been a wild mess of torn up feelings and emotions, and if Aang hadn’t come to her when she was standing on the cliff, she wasn’t quite sure how the scene would have ended. It was something that still haunted her at night; the sharp drop and the choppy water lashing up at her; the strange numbness that filled her body and her inability to feel like she existed without her previous senses—

Korra didn’t want to imagine what Tahno’s coping experiences had been like.

But she wanted to help him.

“Tahno, I want you to feel real again.”

His head snapped up and he looked at her with incredulous eyes. The shock and animation in his face reminded her of how he had looked when they were in the pro-bending arena. The past few months she had spent with him, his eyes had been dull, disinterested, and vacant. She’d only caught a few glimpses of the Tahno she’d detested and grudgingly admired before the pro-bending tournament finale. This hurt version was the Tahno she’d come to know much better during all the time she’d spent coaxing him back to health, and she was surprised to find she shared a kindred spirit in him with his sharp humor and resolve.

She’d torn up the stairs to his apartment after the invasion was over, screaming his name and breathless with her new ability to give him back his life. He’d watched her with dark eyes in a moment that was far more intimate than she had expected. She had felt the very essence of his bending under her hand and untangled its path to his limbs. His chi had flooded his body in a mad rush, fierce and triumphant, and she almost expected him to bend a geyser out of the sink right then and there. Instead, he had just remained kneeling, looking shell shocked and overwhelmed.

She spent the next few days realizing she wanted nothing more than to see bits and pieces of the old Tahno resurfacing in the person he was going to become. He didn’t deserve to lose it all, and Korra wanted to make sure he didn’t.

“How do you know?” he asked, his grip on her hand tightening.

She gave him a faint smile. “I didn’t feel real either. I felt disconnected.”

His face filled with intensity as his eyes bored into hers. He opened his mouth several times as if he was about to speak but couldn’t get the words out. Finally, he managed to whisper, “I feel like a ghost. I couldn’t feel anything for so long, and now that I can…” He closed his eyes and took in a deep, slow breath. “Now that I can, I’m too scared to try. I’m not who I was, Korra. Maybe this person I’ve become isn’t meant to bend.”

“Tahno.” She leaned in until her forehead rested against his. His eyes flashed open and he stared at her with a mixed expression of shock and longing. “Tahno, out of all the water benders I restored, I didn’t meet a single one whose chi was as fierce as yours.”

They rested there in silence for a moment as her words sunk in. “Really,” he whispered, the force of his need to believe her heavy in his voice.

She smiled. “Tahno, it felt like I was letting the ocean lose in your body. You’re a water bender, though and through. Amon never could have taken that from you, and it’s been here this whole time.”

She watched as water filled his eyes and he cracked a small smile. “ _Korra_.” He said her name like a thank you and a promise all at once.

She forced herself to lean back. It wasn’t the time for her to tell him about her feelings. This was his time. She pressed her lips to his forehead on the place where she had restored his bending and pulled away.

“Ready to try this? As a team?”

A crooked grin tugged at the corner of his lips. “Whenever you’re ready, Uh-vatar.”


	4. Bliss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Bliss

Tahno had thought he was done with the softer side of happiness.

He tried to remember feeling sweet or innocent joy for simple things, even going back into to his life at the swamp before he knew Republic City and Republic City knew him.

He usually came up blank.

He’d come to believe the only kind of joy he could get was the fierce kind when he stood on the pro-bending stage, arms outstretched to the blinding lights above his head and frenzied blood pumping adrenaline through his body, all while the blurry figures in the stands screamed: _Tahno! Tahno! Tahno! TAHNO!_

Joy came when he watched his opponents tumble down and when he watched his water slam victory after victory off the edge of the arena. He hadn’t experienced anything like it before in the grubby and simple life he had lived in his parents’ hut. It was fierce, and it only lingered a moment, like the fizzling bubbles in his victory champagne. More than anything, it left him with a sharp and acute hunger for more.

His experience with her had started off the same way. The challenge flashing in her blue eyes brought up the same response in him. He was ready to fight, to compete, and to win.

And he knew she was, too.

It was only after he really had won and he was left with a bitter taste in his mouth that he started to wonder if it was right to feel this way. He raised his hands to the crowd but all he could think of was the raw fury in her face that screamed how dare you. He tried to swallow it down, and then before he could even think about what this new feeling meant or what he would do with it, there was a dark figure and a white flashing mask coming for him and fear was clawing up his throat and there was a icy finger on his forehead and everything in his body was being twisted and bent out of shape—

And then he was falling.

And falling.

And falling.

The only time he had really started to process anything was when uncomfortably warm hands grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. He came to in his apartment and she’d looked at him with such intense fear in her eyes that he felt something in him shiver in response. She said he’d been slumped on his couch since she’d left him there two nights ago when he was released from the healers. That as far as she knew, he hadn’t moved or eaten.

All he knew was that he still felt like he was falling.

That’s when she’s started to come every day to check in on him. She’d bring large rustling bags of groceries and babble on as she tried to figure out how to work his stove. The first thing he said since it all happened was a quiet, “I’ve never used that stove once.”

She stopped what she was doing and stared in a mixture of surprise and hope until slow laughter started to bubble out of her. “I should have known,” she gasped, “that you didn’t cook.”

A tiny smile worked at his lips. They cracked and the inside of his mouth filled with the taste of copper, but something flickered in him for an instant. Something that told him maybe he wasn’t as numb as he felt.

She came often and he found that he was starting to wait for her. There was only so much staring one could do at the same skyline every day before they started to feel even more empty than they already were. She filled up the apartment with her presence, always bursting in like a miniature storm cloud.

She tried to get him to speak with her. At first, it was only monosyllabic answers that clearly indicated he had no interest in engaging in conversation. Her smile never wavered and her eyes never darted down from his face in awkwardness. She soldiered on, and eventually, he found himself joining in.

Little sentences with a hint of dry humor were a small price to pay for the way her face lit up and the way her eyes shone with excitement. Any small effort on his part left her glowing, and he found she was getting him to reveal more and more of himself.

And he found he didn’t feel the same bite of resentment when he finally told her where he was from. Or when he finally let her hear him speak in his heavy swamp accent that he had worked day and night during his first weeks in Republic City to hide. She smiled in what almost seemed like relief. Like she was relived that he was getting better, like she was relieved he had decided to confide in her.

Like she was relieved she had found someone like herself in Republic City.

Once she came during the middle of the night, shaking and shivering and speaking too quickly for him to understand about a nightmare. He grabbed her shoulders with more strength than he thought was left in his body, and tried to anchor her.

“Korra, I’m here.”

Her eyes stopped flicking around the shadows of his apartment and focused on him. Her pupils dilated and a powerful shiver ran through her body. “Tahno,” she whispered in the silence of the empty room. “I’m so scared.”

His throat went dry and he tried to swallow. He didn’t know what to say to that. He was still scared out of his mind. He didn’t know what he was going to do, where he was going to go, because he knew he couldn’t hide in his room forever—

But he knew what helped. And what she had done for him in the simplest terms that had made it bearable.

“I’m here, Korra. I’m here with you.”

Her eyes flooded with tears and she caved into him, shoulders folding and head lowering to rest on his chest. He held her there and wondered how the tables had turned so quickly. How he had started as the one needing someone to be there and ended up becoming the one who was there.

Eventually he steered her over from the entry way to his room and his bed where he helped her lay down, tugging the heavy boots off her feet. She probably had some training session the next morning or some idiotic task force mission. A small part of him snapped in fury at the fact that they didn’t know what they were doing to her, that she was only human and she was expected to bear the weight of all the world’s benders. He was just lowering himself to the floor for the night when she snatched at his hand.

“Please stay.”

Blue eyes flashed down at him in the darkness, still heavy and dark with fear. He stared for a moment and then nodded, shaking with the effort of pulling himself off the floor again. He eased himself into the covers beside her and laid there stiffly until she curled over, pressing her head against his chest and directly over his heart. He breathed slowly in the silence, smelling the rain of the city on her skin and feeling the ridiculous amount of warmth her body radiated.

“Thank you.”

The sound of her voice was muffled against his shirt and he turned to face her, resting his chin on the top of her head. “You’re safe here, Korra.”

“I know.”

Gradually, the heavy atmosphere lifted. The fear and uncertainty left the darkness till it was nothing more than a comforting blanket. They laid there together in their own little bubble of comfort from the monsters and threats lurking outside the doors and windows.

A deep peace rose up in his chest, and with it, Tahno found there was a simple and sweet happiness.


End file.
